Instructions

Typically, there are seven steps involved in upgrading to a newer version of Trac:

1. Bring your server off-line

It is not a good idea to update a running server: the server processes may have parts of the current packages cached in memory, and updating the code will likely trigger internal errors.

Although a database backup will be implicitly created by default when upgrading the environment, it is always a good idea to perform a full backup of the environment using the hotcopy command before beginning.

2. Update the Trac Code

Get the new version as described in TracInstall, or through your operating system package manager.

If you already an earlier version of Trac installed via easy_install, it might be easiest to also use easy_install to upgrade your Trac installation:

easy_install --upgrade Trac==1.2

You may also want to remove the pre-existing Trac code by deleting the trac directory from the Python lib/site-packages directory, or remove Trac .egg files from former versions.
The location of the site-packages directory depends on the operating system and the location in which Python was installed. However, the following locations are typical:

on Linux: /usr/lib/python2.X/site-packages

on Windows: C:\Python2.X\lib\site-packages

on MacOSX: /Library/Python/2.X/site-packages

You may also want to remove the directory in which your static resources are deployed. The exact location depends on your platform. This cleanup is not mandatory, but makes it easier to troubleshoot issues later on, as your installation is uncluttered by code or templates from a previous release that is not used anymore. As usual, make a backup before actually removing things.

3. Upgrade the Trac Environment

Environment upgrades are not necessary for minor version releases unless otherwise noted.

After restarting, Trac should show the instances which need a manual upgrade via the automated upgrade scripts to ease the pain. These scripts are run via trac-admin:

trac-admin /path/to/projenv upgrade

This command will not have any effect if the environment is already up-to-date.

Note that a backup of your database will be performed automatically prior to the upgrade.
This feature is relatively new for PostgreSQL or MySQL databases, so if it fails, you will have to backup the database manually. Then, to perform the actual upgrade:

trac-admin /path/to/projenv upgrade --no-backup

4. Update the Trac Documentation

By default, every Trac environment includes a copy of the Trac documentation for the installed version. However, to keep the included documentation in sync with the installed version of Trac, use the following trac-admin command to upgrade the documentation:

trac-admin /path/to/projenv wiki upgrade

Note that this procedure will leave your WikiStart page intact.

5. Refresh static resources

If you have set up a web server to give out static resources directly (accessed using the /chrome/ URL) then you will need to refresh them using the same command:

trac-admin /path/to/env deploy /deploy/path

This will extract static resources and CGI scripts (trac.wsgi, etc) from new Trac version and its plugins into /deploy/path.

Some web browsers (IE, Opera) cache CSS and Javascript files aggressively, so you may need to instruct your users to manually erase the contents of their browser's cache, a forced refreshed (<F5>) should be enough.

New workflow actions

The ticket creation step is controlled with a workflow action. The default workflow has create and create_and_assign actions. The create action will always be added when upgrading the database. The create_and_assign action will be added if the workflow has an assigned state. You may want to edit your workflow after upgrading the database to customize the actions available on the New Ticket page.

New permissions policy for read-only wiki pages

Since 1.1.2 the read-only attribute of wiki pages is enabled and enforced only when ReadonlyWikiPolicy is in the list of active permission policies. If [trac] permission_policy has the default value DefaultPermissionPolicy, LegacyAttachmentPolicy, then ReadonlyWikiPolicy should be automatically appended to the list when upgrading the environment:

If other permission policies are enabled, trac.ini will need to have ReadonlyWikiPolicy appended to the list of active permission_policies. See TracFineGrainedPermissions#ReadonlyWikiPolicy for additional details on the proper ordering.

Obsolete Plugins

Subversion components not enabled by default for new installations

The Trac components for Subversion support are no longer enabled by default. To enable the svn support, you need to make sure the tracopt.versioncontrol.svn components are enabled, for example by setting the following in the TracIni:

[components]
tracopt.versioncontrol.svn.* = enabled

The upgrade procedure should take care of this and change the TracIni appropriately, unless you already had the svn components explicitly disabled.

Attachments migrated to new location

Another step in the automatic upgrade will change the way the attachments are stored. Create a backup of the attachments directory before upgrading. In case the attachments directory contains some files which are not attachments, the last step of the migration to the new layout will fail: the deletion of the now unused attachments directory can't be done if there are still files and folders in it. You may ignore this error, but better to move them elsewhere and remove the attachments directory manually. The attachments themselves are now all located in your environment below the files/attachments directory.

Behavior of [ticket] default_owner changed

Prior to 1.0, the owner field of new tickets always defaulted to [ticket] default_owner when the value was not empty. If the value was empty, the owner field defaulted to to the Component's owner. In 1.0 and later, the default_owner must be set to < default > to make new tickets default to the Component's owner. This change allows the default_owner to be set to an empty value if no default owner is desired.

Upgrading from Trac 0.11 to Trac 0.12

Python 2.3 no longer supported

The minimum supported version of Python is now 2.4.

SQLite v3.x required

SQLite v2.x is no longer supported. If you still use a Trac database of this format, you'll need to convert it to SQLite v3.x first. See ​PySqlite#UpgradingSQLitefrom2.xto3.x for details.

Note that if you were using the trac-post-commit-hook, you're strongly advised to upgrade it to the new hook documented in the above references and here, as the old hook will not work with anything else than the default repository and even for this case, it won't trigger the appropriate notifications.

Authz permission checking

The authz permission checking has been migrated to a fine-grained permission policy. If you use authz permissions (aka [trac] authz_file and authz_module_name), you must add AuthzSourcePolicy in front of your permission policies in [trac] permission_policies. You must also remove BROWSER_VIEW, CHANGESET_VIEW, FILE_VIEW and LOG_VIEW from your global permissions with trac-admin $ENV permission remove or the "Permissions" admin panel.

Microsecond timestamps

All timestamps in database tables, except the session table, have been changed from "seconds since epoch" to "microseconds since epoch" values. This change should be transparent to most users, except for custom reports. If any of your reports use date/time columns in calculations (e.g. to pass them to datetime()), you must divide the values retrieved from the database by 1'000'000. Similarly, if a report provides a calculated value to be displayed as a date/time (i.e. with a column named "time", "datetime", "changetime", "date", "created" or "modified"), you must provide a microsecond timestamp, that is, multiply your previous calculation with 1'000'000.

Trac Macros, Plugins

The Trac macros will need to be adapted, as the old-style wiki-macros are not supported anymore due to the drop of ​ClearSilver and the HDF. They need to be converted to the new-style macros, see WikiMacros. When they are converted to the new style, they need to be placed into the plugins directory instead and not wiki-macros, which is no longer scanned for macros or plugins.

For FCGI/WSGI/CGI users

For those who run Trac under the CGI environment, run this command in order to obtain the trac.*gi file:

trac-admin /path/to/env deploy /deploy/directory/path

This will create a deploy directory with the following two subdirectories: cgi-bin and htdocs. Then update your Apache configuration file httpd.conf with this new trac.cgi location and htdocs location.

Web Admin plugin integrated

If you had the ​WebAdmin plugin installed, you can uninstall it as it is part of the Trac code base since 0.11.

New Default Configurable Workflow

When you run trac-admin <env> upgrade, your trac.ini will be modified to include a [ticket-workflow] section. The workflow configured in this case is the original workflow, so that ticket actions will behave like they did in 0.10:

Enable JavaScript to display the workflow graph.

There are some significant caveats in this, such as accepting a ticket sets it to 'assigned' state, and assigning a ticket sets it to 'new' state. So you will probably want to migrate to "basic" workflow; ​contrib/workflow/migrate_original_to_basic.py may be helpful. See TracWorkflow for a detailed description of the new basic workflow.

7. Restart the Web Server

If you are not running CGI, reload the new Trac code by restarting your web server.

Known Issues

Customized Templates

Trac supports customization of its Genshi templates by placing copies of the templates in the <env>/templates folder of your environment or in a common location specified in the [inherit] templates_dir configuration setting. If you choose to do so, be aware that you will need to repeat your changes manually on a copy of the new templates when you upgrade to a new release of Trac (even a minor one), as the templates will likely evolve. So keep a diff around.

The preferred way to perform TracInterfaceCustomization is to write a custom plugin doing an appropriate ITemplateStreamFilter transformation, as this is more robust in case of changes: we usually won't modify element ids or change CSS classes, and if we have to do so, this will be documented in the ​TracDev/ApiChanges pages.

ZipImportError

Due to internal caching of zipped packages, whenever the content of the packages change on disk, the in-memory zip index will no longer match and you'll get irrecoverable ZipImportError errors. Better anticipate and bring your server down for maintenance before upgrading.
See ​#7014 for details.

Wiki Upgrade

trac-admin will not delete or remove default wiki pages that were present in a previous version but are no longer in the new version.

Trac database upgrade

A known issue in some versions of ​PySqlite (2.5.2-2.5.4) prevents the trac-admin upgrade script from successfully upgrading the database format. It is advised to use either a newer or older version of the sqlite python bindings to avoid this error. For more details see ticket ​#9434.

Parent dir

If you use a Trac parent env configuration and one of the plugins in one child does not work, none of the children will work.

Related topics

Upgrading Python

Upgrading Python to a newer version will require reinstallation of Python packages: Trac itself of course, but also ​easy_install, if you've been using that. If you are using Subversion, you'll also need to upgrade the Python bindings for svn.

Windows and Python 2.6

If you've been using CollabNet's Subversion package, you may need to uninstall that in favor of ​Alagazam, which has the Python bindings readily available, see ​TracSubversion. That package works without tweaking.